The thoughts, semi-thoughts, splenetic rantings and vague half ideas, of a leftie-lib marooned in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

Friday, 4 March 2016

Tory Leadership Slow Motion Apocalypse Underway

Get in now for front row seats as the Best Show On Earth After The American Election And Most Other Shows Even Cats gets underway.

Who will replace the red faced non-entity bumbler when he finally buggers off the political scene, having accomplished nearly nothing other than squandering a recovery, prolonging a recession and making Britain look stupid for the whole of Europe - even Greece (GREECE?!) - to laugh at?

Will it be Boris, effectively upping the buffoon quotient?

Or George 'Why did 80,000 people boo him' Osborne?

Or someone thing else?

Who will turn out to be the brightness in this dullness of Tories? The fastest in this loiter of sloths? The sternest in this gutter of wet bus tickets?

Earlier this week there was a new YouGov poll of Conservative party members in the Times or, more specifically, two new polls of Conservative party members: YouGov polled the same party members before and after Boris Johnson came out in favour of leaving the EU to see what impact it had on the leadership race. Results are here.

At the simplest level Boris was ahead before, and was ahead afterwards, but there were some interesting shifts. Boris’s approval rating among Conservative party members dropped significantly after he came out (from 83% approval to 76% approval), but his position in the leadership race improved. Presumably he annoyed some members who saw his actions as disloyal or disagreed with his stance, but he consolidated the support from those who did not.

Almost unavoidably Boris coming out was going to upset some members – he has carefully avoided having many fixed political opinions over the years, so I expect many pro-European members would have assumed Boris agreed with them, many anti-EU members would have assumed Boris agreed with them. For once, he is forced off the fence and forced to upset some people – so his overall approval rating among Tory party members fell. However, in the race to be the next Tory leader his position has improved.

43% now say they’d back Boris, up from 38%, with support falling for Theresa May and Sajid Javid, both of whom were seen as potential “outers” and both of whom ended up supporting Remain. Asked how they’d vote in a match up between Osborne & Boris the figures don’t change as much (Boris 55%, George 36% before, Boris 56%, George 38% after) – the broader balance between those party members who want Osborne as the next leader and those who don’t hasn’t changed much, it’s just Boris is now more clearly the “not-George” candidate.

Only a quarter of Tory party members said that the leadership candidates’s stances on the EU were an important factor in picking the next leader – 4% said they wanted the next leader to be someone who had campaigned for the UK to stay, 20% wanted the next leader to be someone who campaigned to leave, three-quarters picked other criteria as their main considerations. Far and away the most widely picked criteria was someone who will make a competent PM, picked by 67%, followed by someone who has a good chance of winning the next election on 52%.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but if only Anthony Wells was a girl and there was a sort of heterosexual equivalent of being Gay Married, I'd do that with him in an instant.